infectious disease

Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus that is thought to cause between 20,000 and 180,000 deaths each year in Africa. Researchers have previously used environmental measures to map areas most at risk of yellow fever outbreaks, but the authors of…

Houseflies (Musca domestica) aren’t just annoying; they contaminate food and spread disease among humans and animals worldwide. But they rapidly evolve resistance to the usual insecticides, prompting the proposal of an alternative control strategy: RNA interference using double stranded RNA…

Antibiotic resistance poses a great challenge in treatment of serious bacterial infections, but development of therapies that could replace antibiotics in such severe cases has had limited success. In a new PLOS Biology study, Kristofer Wollein Waldetoft and Sam Brown…

Vampire bats might seem like the stuff of nightmares but these blood-drinking mammals exist, and they also spread disease. In Latin America, the bat Desmodus rotundus is the main carrier of rabies, which it transmits when feeding on cattle. The…

Professional support boosts benefit of blood pressure self-monitoring While home blood pressure monitoring is known to help treat patients with hypertension, how best to implement this remains unclear. New PLOS Medicine research suggests that people who monitor their own blood…

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry the pathogens responsible for dengue fever, Zika fever and other diseases, were first found in California in 2013. In a new PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases study, the authors report that the insect immigrants were repeat…

Sleep-wake rhythms vary widely among individuals and between age groups Our circadian systems synchronize with light and darkness in the environment, giving rise to chronotypes: individual rhythms in physiology, cognition and behavior. In a new PLOS ONE study, researchers analyzed…

Millions of people in tropical countries are at risk for contracting tuberculosis (TB) each year, with the existing Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine protecting only against the most severe childhood form. However, many of these people have pre-existing parasitic infections, which…

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacterium that can cause devastating lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. It lives with multiple other microbes in biofilms in these patients’ airways, and is resistant to many antibiotics. Hui Wu and colleagues at the University…

Neisseria meningitidis is a major cause of human bacterial meningitis and sepsis worldwide. The bacteria are known to aggregate into microcolonies in epithelial cells in the throat, before dispersal may facilitate the establishment of invasive disease. In a new study, Ann-Beth Jonsson…